Monthly Archives: December 2009

I know that I need to pay more dues to assuage my fears that all which hold meaning to me are beyond my horizon. Sort of like being fueled by the fantasy of what tomorrow brings, or how art is better seen through an f/1.2 lens, or how a 4WD can take me far away into the desert rocks and snow capped mountains. There may be some truth to the matter that spending (smartly) on gear can take you places, and that there is no use in making money if you’re not enjoying it. However, my free time is spent fattening my ass in front of a computer instead of actually busting an ankle running the walk. Does the picture exist, if it is never taken? And what can be really shared of that imprisoned in your mind? I need to get out of this rut, and it’s a horrible feeling to be needlessly stuck in the world’s pecking order. Guess what, there really is no such thing as life insurance. Everyday is a gift to take apart, get lost, and find your way back all over again.

I was walking the dog this morning, when the security guy pulls up right beside me. “You’re Gopez right??”, and I say yeah what’s up. He says he was wondering who this kid was, and thought it might be that Gopez kid but that I usually had my glasses on, and going out on my scooter or the ‘hippie van’. Chatted a little bit, asked me what LMU was on my sweatshirt and told him about Loyola Marymount and how I graduated in ’03. Then his eyes got wide. 2003?? I told him I’m 28, and that’s when he totally shat himself and couldn’t believe it. And that girl who rides with you on the back of your scooter? Yeah she’s 25.

“All this time I thought you were just a kid who got out of high school!”

Exactly. Like that time I took Kat to my company Christmas party; we were the only ones carded at the bar and I joked to everyone that Kat was a senior in HS with a fake ID, and thought I was taking her to my prom. ;)

Our weekend at Unique LA was a moderate success, based on the preliminary counts. On the first day, my estimate was blown out of the water since it felt a lot slower than last time, and by the end of the second day we apparently ended up selling more than 500 buttons! If I shut my mind up and think about it, 500 is a damn lot of buttons.

I remember on Saturday night, staying up till 2:40am printing and punching 240 holes on paper. I sat in the middle of the living room carpet and thought about what all this work had meant, how my hands were trembling from using a hand-held paper puncher against very thick and stubborn glossy photo paper. How badly I just wanted to drop dead into a pile of ZZZzz.

At the end of the event, we realize that each dollar that a person spent with us, is a dollar that we truly earned. Not only in the time it takes Kat to design and tweak each graphic, but the time it takes to make each of them by hand. I’ll admit that it’s not a lot of ‘real’ money we’re making, but the real payoff comes in seeing people’s reactions when they browse through our display – a lot hesitant at first – and just like a kid finding a shiny coin in the madness, breaking out into a giant beaming smile. That smile, across everyone who managed to part with their hard earned dollar, is what we ultimately aim to achieve. To allow the tiny capsule of art to be shared, to be part of someone’s own experience and stories, and to make that connection with the rest of the world. Thank you, Kat, for being an awesome artist :)

And so we’ve been preparing the past few weeks for this weekend’s Unique LA show, with the new display setup and a flurry of button design making from (mostly) Kat and I. Today was the first day.

There was this one girl who seemed really friendly, and genuinely interested in how our setup was made. Magnets, and a little bit of glue gun, I explained, which held the buttons neatly against the varnished plywood sitting on an art easel. Cool, cool. So she goes over our buttons, and points to one on the table and asks, “What does FML mean?”. And so I basically explained that it meant F ck My Life, borne from this website where people write down the story of their life, and everyone else votes if the poster either deserves it, or if his life really does suck. So she nods, and mentions something about it being funny.